for my 5,000th post why I am a liberal! [View all]

[gopiscrap]

Last edited Tue Sep 17, 2013, 10:06 PM - Edit history (1)

To begin with it is because of war!

I have seen all my life the ravages of war upon actual people.
I was born in Germany 12 years after World War II and I was born two months early directly because of war. My mom was living in a major city and Hitler ordered all the children to leave the cities (as Hitler put it, to preserve the future of the Third Reich) because there was no transportation during the winter of 1943 she had to walk for miles and miles in icy and snowy conditions. This gave her frost bite and in order to save the life of her child (me) she had to have her leg amputated below the knee and the toes on her right foot also amputated. All my life from a very early age I saw her suffer. I saw her both suffer and also put up with the snide comments from my peers. The neighborhood I was born into 12 years after the war was not very sanitary. I contracted a case of encephalitis and this left me with poor eye sight, hyper activity and equilibrium problems, once again not being able to be a full part of my peers and also caused me to struggle in school toil mid high school. I struggled to be normal according to my peers all through my youth.

When I was seven, a week before Christmas, my father had a fatal heart attack as a result of being shot in January of 1961 in Vietnam. He died and I remember to this day being a small child, looking at flag draped coffin and listening to the mournful rendition of taps followed by the soul searing blasts of the rifles as the military saluted his service and we laid him to rest at 38 years old.

I have seen first hand upon both my parents and myself the direct detrimental and brutal effects of aggression and national belligerence and I don't care what you call it, a police action, an incident, a campaign, a response, war is war! And for most of my adult life it has been the liberals who have advocated for solutions other than war. It has been the liberals who have stood up to the rest of the common national thought and have been brave enough to reason for a non violent solution.

This along with lengthy teaching about social justice from the Franciscan's as I attended a Catholic School has inculcated in me not only an abhorrance for military aggression, but a love for the poor. It taught me that we are our brother's keeper..."blessed are the poor" "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" "the poor you shall always have among you"
and my friends, voting to cut food stamps as conservatives do, voting to cut education, voting to cut mass transit, voting for policies that decimate the environment, voting for obscene sums of money for the military, voting for incarceration over rehabilitation is not being a liberal.

One of my greatest sorrows politically was when during Ronald Reagan's presidency the word liberal became a bad word and the Democrats and even some liberals shied away from it. Some called themselves progressives. Well I wear the label liberal proudly. I ran for US Congress from the left and didn't win but did change the conversation in our district. As a naturalized citizen that is my proudest political achievement.

I thank DU for being here. To talk, share, converse, argue, to laugh, have my mind changed, to vent and learn.You're a great community and I am honored and proud to be a part of it. Thank you for letting me chime in 5,000 times!